Incompetent government employees? Impossible.

Welcome to the world of uninformed slashdotters. This contract was likely best value, not low-bid. Low-bid procurements are pretty rare, especially for something like this. It's not the contractors job to overbid the contract to provide services the government decided it didn't need.

Then maybe the real issue is people using the school system to indoctrinate people. It's no secret that educators across America push liberal ideals. Just take a look at the list of Obama's top donors, http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/contrib.php?cycle=2008&cid=N00009638. It should be stopped all around.

How can you see it as not relevant, in a discussion of government taking over for the private sector.

I guess you missed the citation in my post. Again, number of papers does not equal dollars spent. The US supports 82% of biomedical R&D.

Talk about irrelevancies. Way to bring global warming into this. And that further discredits you, there is clear evidence they bs'd their evidence to support their agenda. That's why they "lost" their data.

Does every paper cost the same to produce? Here is a source on the data I provided, http://www.efpia.org/content/Default.asp?PageID=388.

When do you all plan to start supporting yourselves? Until then take your righteous indignation and shove it.

I'm actually aware of that, having gone to a Catholic school. Just to expand on this a bit, in Catholic school they teach religion and science in two separate classes. They teach the creation story as a parable, and evolution and the big bang as facts. They also teach the history and beliefs of every major religion, not just Christianity, so you get a balanced view. Personally, I always liked Buddhism and Hinduism.

Insurance is the appropriate model. What is inappropriate is people refusing to pay for it, developing conditions, then insisting someone else pay for their poor planning.

The definition of insurance isn't "pay for everything bad that happens to me, past present, or future."

That's only because your country doesn't adequately contribute to biomedical research and development. The US pays for 82% of global biomedical R&D.

Do you believe that you can't buy insurance after you wreck your car? Those greedy bastards.

Why do catholic schools consistently outperform public schools on standardized science tests?

Who is going to develop drugs once there is no longer any money in it? At present, the United States represents more than 82% of the global spending on biomedical research and development. Other countries should either pay their fair share, or go without our drugs.

And before you start spouting off with bullshit statistics regarding infant mortality, know that the only valid comparison is patient outcomes for identical issues. Other countries like to grossly under report things like infant mortality by discounting children that died within 24 hours of birth, and those born prematurely. The United States leads in both patient outcomes, and in medical innovation.

How fudged are those numbers? The global warming alarmists have had their hand caught in the cookie jar. Until they release all of their data for outside audit by dissenting scientists, their findings are worthless.

They sneak these bills through because they can't withstand public scrutiny. Obama and Pelosi are both liars, not allowing people to view the bill before voting, and holding the vote on a Saturday night to skirt public and media scrutiny is exactly the opposite of their campaign promises.

When a users posts a message, I would have the web server pass the message to a server that listens for messages that are being sent. That server would collect the mail then place them as a payload package in the messaging queue when either a fixed number of mail recipients, probably around 500, or a fixed time passes, probably 500ms, whichever comes first. When the payload reaches the front of the queue, the messaging server working on the payload would parse through all the messages building a model of all the data it needs to render all of the messages. It would then send a low priority FQL multiquery requesting all of the data it needs to render and send all of the requests. From there, the messaging server would render both the updated view of the mail when viewing the thread, and view of the thread when viewing the inbox. These would be passed to a persistent memcached setup.

An FQL query would be generated for each user that would increment their inbox message counter, remove the memcached key of the old thread preview from the array of keys representing their inbox while prepending the new key to the array, and append the key to the array representing the thread. When this was assembled for all mail, another low priority multi-query would be sent committing this change.

At this point I'd purge the old thread preview keys from the persistent memcached setup, and store the raw data in a table indexed by both the thread preview key, and the mail view key. The raw data would be stored in case a design change ever necessitated re-rendering all of the mail, or in the case of a user name change.

Finally, I would generate and send an e-mail to each user telling them they have a new message.

This is complex, but it also means that to render an inbox, the only thing that has to be done is to retrieve the array of message thread preview keys, and request each thread preview by key from memcached. Of course, this collection could also be cached.

Note: I intentionally left out some things in the interest of time, like sent message display, read and unread flagging, spam filtering, new message highlighting, and I'm sure others. It shouldn't be difficult to see how this basic model can be expanded to cover these cases.